23I90
architects
Bangladesh Airforce Museum
Landscape at Dhaka
BASIC INFORMATION
Bangladesh Airforce
sitting facilities, entry, fencing etc
design year
2015
Landscape
built
site area
8.4 acres
construction area
variable
ruksana afroz, Khandoker Tariqul Islam, salauddin ahmed, Razia Azad, Mustafa Tarique Hadi
Agargaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Bangladesh Air Force Museum
Landscape · Agargaon, Dhaka · 2015
The landscape commission for the Bangladesh Air Force Museum in Agargaon asked 23/90 Architects to transform an 8.4-acre park site into a coherent public space worthy of the institution it surrounds, while accommodating the museum's displayed aircraft and the civic programme of a destination that serves visitors from across Dhaka.
The project proceeds from a simple observation: the park's most powerful spatial asset is its existing canopy of mature trees, a dense and continuous cover that no new intervention could replicate or improve. The landscape design works with this canopy rather than against it, inserting a network of brick-paved pathways that wind through the tree cover, their curves following the natural geometry of the existing planting rather than imposing a new orthogonal order on the site.
Seating is resolved through a series of terraced amphitheatre-like platforms set at ground level, their stepped brick and concrete construction integrated into the landscape so that the distinction between sitting surface and ground plane is gradual rather than abrupt. The section does more than it appears. Beneath the stepped terracing, a restaurant is embedded into the landscape, its volume concealed within the mass of the plinth so that the civic seating above gives no indication of the dining space below. The two programmes share a single built element, the landscape surface and the interior use resolved as a single sectional act.
The most sculptural element in the park is a large triangular tensile canopy of steel and cable, its angular geometry reading against the organic forms of the tree canopy above it as a deliberate architectural counterpoint. It marks a node within the landscape and provides covered gathering space without enclosure, its open frame admitting light and air while defining a sheltered territory beneath.
The museum's aircraft, including helicopters and fixed-wing planes, are displayed across the site as found objects within the landscape, their presence giving the park a quality of discovery that conventional landscape treatments rarely achieve.
